Intel’s 15th Gen Arrow Lake processors will be the first in a very long time to lack hyper-threading (SMT). As previously discussed, they won’t feature Rentable Units either. The confirmation comes from @xinoassassin1 on X, who claims that Lion Cove will drop hyper-threading to prepare for the shift to Rentable Units. The 17th Gen Nove Lake processors will be the first to adopt the next-gen multi-threading technology.
The 15th Gen Arrow Lake processors will be the true successor to Alder/Raptor Lake on desktop, featuring the upgraded Lion Cove and Skymont cores. The “Lion Cove” P-cores are expected to increase their L2 cache by 50% to 3MB per core. Based on the 2nm-class Intel 20A process, they are expected to offer lofty single-threaded performance gains while improving thread scheduling for the hybrid platform.
Early estimates claim a performance uplift of up to 20% for Arrow Lake (versus the Raptor Lake Refresh). Most gains are expected in Floating Point and Memory-sensitive workloads, including gaming. The iGPU is going to get a makeover. Courtesy of the Xe-LPG Gen 2 graphics architecture, the 15th Gen family will offer at least twice the performance of Raptor Lake. 3DMark Time Spy and Wildlife Extreme Unlimited are 2.4x and 2.2x faster, respectively.
The 15th Gen Arrow Lake family is expected to be followed by a refresh with up to 40 cores (8P + 32E), at least on desktop. The mobility segment might get a new architecture, perhaps Panther Lake. Intel has been following a mobility-first approach with new process nodes and core architectures, as seen with Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, and Meteor Lake. This reduces the load on new nodes while keeping the roadmap on track.
